Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian to Speak on Lincoln and Slavery

Department of History Speaker Series presents Eric Foner on September 22.

(September 06, 2011) —
The University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences Department of History announces that Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and one of this country’s most prominent historians, will give a lecture on his recently published best-selling book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize, The Fiery Trial is the story of Lincoln's — and the nation's — transformation through the crucible of slavery and emancipation. The lecture will take place on Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 4:30pm in the Storer Auditorium, UM School of Business Administration, 5250 University Drive, on the University of Miami Coral Gables campus. The public is welcome and admission is free of charge.

In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. David S. Reynolds in The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Do we need yet another book on Lincoln?... Well, yes, we do—if the book is by so richly informed a commentator as Eric Foner. Foner tackles what would seem to be an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and manages to cast new light on it.... Because of his broad-ranging knowledge of the 19th century, Foner is able to provide the most thorough and judicious account of Lincoln's attitudes toward slavery that we have.” The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee noted that The Fiery Trial was “a well orchestrated examination of Lincoln’s changing views of slavery, bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story.”

Professor Foner has taught at Cambridge University as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, Oxford University as Harmsworth Professor of American History, Moscow State University as Fulbright Professor, and at Queen Mary, University of London as Leverhulme Visiting Scholar. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, and many other publications, and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows, including Charlie Rose, Book Notes, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Bill Moyers Journal, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered, and in historical documentaries on PBS and the History Channel. He was the on-camera historian for "Freedom: A History of Us," on PBS in 2003. He has lectured extensively to both academic and non-academic audiences.

Professor Foner's publications have concentrated on the intersections of intellectual, political, and social history, and the history of American race relations. His best-known books are: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970; reissued with new preface 1995); Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988) (winner, among other awards, of the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize, and Los Angeles Times Book Award); and The Story of American Freedom (1998).

The Department of History Speaker Series is open to the public and in 2011-2012 will also feature Gail Lenhoff, Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California-Los Angeles on November 10th; Barbara Weinstein , Professor of History at New York University, on March 1st; and David Nirenberg, Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, on April 11th.

For more information about Professor Foner’s lecture and the University of Miami Department of History Speaker Series please see http://www.as.miami.edu/history/news or call (305) 284-3660.

Professor Foner’s lecture is co-sponsored by the UM Center for the Humanities and the Program in American Studies.